But things may shake out more
along the lines of journalism versus armchair yammering. Both can be,
and are, presented on Web sites that call themselves blogs. Both have
been presented in the mainstream media all along.

"The State of the Blogosphere" presented at sifry.com
this week by David L. Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a leading blog
search site, shows just how complicated things have become. According
to Mr. Sifry's data, mainstream media sites, as measured by the number
of blogs linking to them, are trouncing news-oriented blogs by a
growing margin. Bloggers link to The New York Times Web site about three times as often as they link to the technology-oriented Boingboing.net. Only four blogs show up in the top 33 sites.

But
it isn't the data or the rankings that matter most here. More
interesting is that it's becoming hard to tell what is a blog and what
is mainstream media.

Mr. Sifry calls Boingboing a blog — and so
it is. But it also does some original reporting, and has professional
journalists on its staff. And oddly, Mr. Sifry calls Slashdot (slashdot.com), a technology site with material created mostly by users, a mainstream site.

Meanwhile,
more and more mainstream media sites are blogging. In the end, users
are most likely drawn to sites for the quality and trustworthiness of
the material presented.

The report also shows that while blogs
may present no real threat to top news organizations, niche
publications are far more vulnerable. "This realm of publishing, which
I call 'The Magic Middle' of the attention curve," Mr. Sifry writes,
"highlights some of the most interesting and influential bloggers and
publishers that are often writing about topics that are topical or
niche. And what is so interesting to me is how exciting, informative
and witty these blogs often are. I've noticed that often these blogs
are more topical or focused on a niche area, like gardening, knitting,
nanotech, MP3's or journalism."

This Book Brought to You By
For the first time, a major publisher is offering a book online at no
cost to readers, supported by advertising. HarperCollins is selling the
book, "Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on
Your Own" by Bruce Judson, through Mr. Judson's site, brucejudson.com. An alert poster at MetaFilter.com
noted that the publisher's page for the book did not mention the free
version. Despite the cheesy title, Mr. Judson, a fellow at the Yale
School of Management, won accolades from Library Journal and others for
his book.

Unpaid Shills WantedSony
BMG, fresh from being exposed by a blogger for planting stealth, and
potentially dangerous, antipiracy code in some of its CD's, is seeking
interns to plug its artists online. The interns will promote artists in
Web communities where many people go specifically to share music
without the influence of corporate marketers. "Do you blog, have lots
of friends at your MySpace page, and love music?" its ad at entertainmentcareers.net
asks. Epic Records, a Sony BMG imprint, "is looking for skilled,
motivated interns to promote artists on social networking sites like
MySpace, Purevolume, Facebook and others." The ad doesn't say whether
the interns will identify themselves to their online "friends" as
agents of Sony BMG. But they'll get college credit (for this unpaid
job, Sony BMG only wants applicants eligible for that) and a bullet
point for their résumés, so what's the difference?

If Dogs Run Free
The mundane, inhumane, toxic world of humans trapped in gray cubicles
is artfully, and unfavorably, compared with the mindless, free, happy
world of dogs romping in a park in a short film on a Web site that
features several films by Mitchell Rose (mitchellrose.com).
Another short, surprisingly poignant film depicts "a man and a 22-ton
John Deere excavator" who "dance a dance of discovery, fulfillment and
eventually, the loss that any diesel-based relationship must suffer."
DAN MITCHELL